Origin Stories: Recalling my life as a telemarketer

While eating dinner, the phone rings. It’s a telemarketer, but I do not hang up. I do not threaten him, nor do I curse him. I do not reach for my airhorn. Instead, I treat him like a human being, because I know he is a human being. I know this not because I am some kind of Buddhist saint with empathy for all living things, be they insects, arachnids or even telemarketers. It is because, years ago, before I made my living as a writer and radio host, I sold The Gazette in Montreal over the phone.

When you’re a little kid, you never decide that one day, you’re going to become a telemarketer. It’s not something you plan. It just happens, like the way going bald just happens, or the way falling down a flight of stairs just happens. One minute you’re at the top of the landing, eating tasty hors d’oeuvres and making witty banter with an attractive brunette and the next, you’re at the bottom. And you’ll be damned if you can remember each one of the individual steps that led you between the two.

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All during the time I worked in The Gazette pitching room, I found it nearly impossible to bring myself to tell anyone I was a telemarketer. When people asked what I did for a living, I’d simply say I was a salesman, a word I believed held greater dignity. And when they asked me what it was that I sold, I would say dreams. And then they would say, “Oh,” and I would become uncomfortable. And then they would become uncomfortable. Then they would stop asking me anything.

As you might expect, the hard thing about selling things over the phone was that there was just so much rejection. Even though you were calling almost 200 people a day, 98% of whom wanted to see you dead, you still had to bring a certain hopefulness to each call, a feeling that this one, the call you’re making at that moment, could be the one. It was almost like trying to hypnotize yourself into believing that something as certain as gravity didn’t exist, and the next time you dropped the apple, it wouldn’t fall to the ground, but would float up into the sky like a helium balloon.

I would often pretend that the people on the other end of the line were sock puppets to soften the sting of their hang-up. I once shared this thought with a girl who’d just started working there.

“Pretend there’s a little sock-puppet on the other end,” I encouraged. “All cute with coat-button eyes, holding the phone in his mouth.”

She considered the logic of this for a moment.

“How does he talk with a phone in his mouth?” she asked.

And for this, I really didn’t have an answer.

After about an hour, she began to cry in earnest. She told me it was her first job.

“I’m really a musician” she said.

“If you really hate it, you should just quit,” I said.

And she did quit, right at the break. I guess I was saying to her what I wished someone would have said to me: Get out. Sell pot, sell your own blood, do the Charleston on street corners for pocket change, but get out.

I would eventually develop the requisite moxie to tell myself just that. But unfortunately, it would take 10 years.